What Is the Phoenix? The Bird That Burns and Returns

The Egyptians of Heliopolis, the city of the sun, honoured a bird called the bennu, shown in tomb paintings as a grey heron with two long plumes at the back of its head, standing on the mound that first rose from the waters at the creation of the world. It was the soul of the sun god Ra and the sign of his rising, and it was linked with the flooding of the Nile and with Osiris, who died and returned. Whether the bennu was ever thought to burn is unclear; its rebirth was the daily rebirth of the sun. Heliopolis was the city Greek travellers visited to learn Egyptian wisdom, and the bird they brought home from it had changed on the way.

Herodotus, writing about 430 BC, reported what the priests of Heliopolis had told him: that a sacred bird called the phoenix, red and gold and eagle-sized, came to Egypt from Arabia once every 500 years, carrying the body of its dead father wrapped in myrrh, to bury it in the temple of the sun. He said he had not seen it and did not believe it. The name is Greek and means purple-red, or perhaps Phoenician, the colour and the people being named for the same dye. The fire came later: by the first century AD Roman writers, Ovid, Pliny and the poet Martial, had the bird build a nest of cinnamon and frankincense, die in it, and produce from its body a worm that grew into the next phoenix, and the Roman senator Manilius wrote that its life measured a great year of 540 years. The elements as they settled:

• •A single bird, unique in the world, of brilliant red and gold plumage
• •A life of 500 years, or 540, or 1,000, in a paradise in Arabia or India
• •A death in a nest of spices, by fire in most versions
• •A rebirth from the ashes or from a worm in the corpse, the new bird carrying the old one's remains to the altar of the sun at Heliopolis
• •An association with the sun, the cycle of ages, and the return of a golden time

The first Christians found the story ready-made. Clement of Rome, writing to the Corinthians around 96 AD, cited the phoenix as evidence that God could raise the dead, since he had shown the pattern in nature, and the bird appears in early Christian art, on tombs, mosaics and the walls of catacombs, as the resurrection of Christ and of the faithful. The medieval bestiaries repeated it with moral commentary, the bird gathering spices as Christ took on the fragrance of the Old and New Testaments, and it was painted in churches through the Renaissance. It was a Christian symbol that no one pretended was Christian in origin, and that is part of why it lasted; it belonged to everyone.

The Chinese fenghuang, usually translated as phoenix, is a different bird, a composite of pheasant, peacock and crane that appears in times of peace and good government and is paired with the dragon as the empress with the emperor; it does not burn. The Persian simurgh, the Hindu Garuda, the Slavic firebird of the ballet and the Native American thunderbird are birds of power and the sun that have been called phoenixes and are not. The Russian firebird comes closest, a glowing bird whose feather lights a room, and the Jewish tradition has the milcham, a bird that refused the fruit of Eden and was rewarded with immortality. The pattern beneath them all, a sun-bird that dies and returns, is the sun itself, which every culture watched go down in fire and come back.

The phoenix is the most useful of mythical animals because it means one thing that everyone needs: that what has burned can return. Cities destroyed by fire, Atlanta, Chicago, San Francisco, Coventry, put it on their seals; nations reborn from war put it on their coins; people who have recovered from ruin put it on their skin. It has been the emblem of Elizabeth I, of Joan of Arc's Orleans, of the Order of the Phoenix in Greece and in the Harry Potter books, and of a dozen companies that failed and reformed. A heron on a mudbank at the edge of the Nile, seen by priests as the sun's soul, became, by way of a sceptical Greek and some Roman poets, the shape that hope takes when it needs a bird.

The Greek word phoinix did several jobs at once, and the overlap may have shaped the legend. Besides the bird, the colour purple-red and the Phoenicians, it was also the Greek name for the date palm, a tree of the same desert margins the phoenix was said to come from. The Roman writer Pliny the Elder recorded a claim that the bird took its name from the palm, and mentioned a palm that was said to die and come back to life along with it. Whether the tree and the bird were linked from the start, or only by later writers playing on the word, is uncertain.

The bird has kept finding new places to land. In the late sixteenth century Dutch navigators charting the southern sky named a small constellation Phoenix, alongside other exotic creatures such as the toucan and the peacock, and it still appears on star maps today, though it sits too far south to be seen well from Britain. In 2008 NASA landed a spacecraft called Phoenix near the north pole of Mars, where it dug into the soil and found water ice; the name was chosen partly because the lander was built from hardware left over from an earlier mission that had been cancelled, a machine risen from the remains of another.

One feature of the legend made the phoenix especially useful to rulers: it needs no partner. Because only one exists at a time and it is reborn from itself, ancient and medieval writers described it as reproducing without mating, and the late Roman poet Lactantius, in a poem about the bird written around 300 AD, called it happy in being female or male or neither. For a queen who never married, that was ideal. Elizabeth I was repeatedly likened to the phoenix, unique and self-sufficient, and the comparison helped turn her single state from a political worry into a sign of rarity.

The symbol also eased the awkward question of what would follow her. If a phoenix produces its heir from its own ashes, a childless monarch can still have a true successor. Shakespeare and John Fletcher used exactly this idea in Henry VIII, written after James I had come to the throne: at the infant Elizabeth's christening, a prophecy declares that when the maiden phoenix dies, her ashes will create another heir as great in admiration as herself. It was a flattering way of presenting a king from Scotland, who was no child of hers, as Elizabeth's own rebirth rather than a break in the line.

The phoenix is the mythical bird that lives for centuries, dies in a nest of spices and fire and is reborn from its own ashes, a story that grew from the Egyptian bennu, the heron of the sun god at Heliopolis, through Herodotus's sceptical report of a bird that buried its father, to the Roman version with the flames and the rebirth. Early Christians took it as a natural proof of resurrection, medieval art spread it, and it endures as the emblem of every city, nation and person that has come back from ruin.